April 26 (Bloomberg) -- Lee Bollinger had yet to take over
as president of Columbia University in 2002 when he toured a
largely industrial area about 10 blocks north of the historic
campus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Columbia, the fifth-oldest U.S. college, was scouting new
sites to expand as it outgrew its century-old, Beaux-Arts home
in Morningside Heights. Traveling past faded warehouses, auto
shops and scattered apartments above 125th Street in West
Harlem, Bollinger could see the ideal location for a modern
urban campus, stretching from the elevated subway line on
Broadway with its monumental steel trestles to the West Side
Highway next to the Hudson River.

“It was an area that I think was beautiful but nobody else
thought it was beautiful,” Bollinger, 65, said in an interview
last month. “Lots and lots of people said to me why would you
move there? It’s ugly.”

Bollinger, who will complete 10 years in office this June,
has elevated Columbia, spearheading a $5 billion fundraising
campaign, installing a new endowment team that produced the Ivy
League’s best returns, and poaching faculty that have drawn
record numbers of applicants and further opened the spigot of
federal research dollars. Underlining these advances has been
his single-minded determination to expand the campus even in the
face of neighborhood and some faculty dissent.

Laying the Foundation

After buying almost all the land it wants in the
neighborhood known as Manhattanville, Columbia is clearing the
site for a nine-story science center with 70 labs scheduled to
open in 2016, the first of 16 new buildings set for the area.
The progress contrasts with New York University, where
Bollinger’s contemporary John Sexton has seen an ambitious
growth plan in Manhattan’s historic Greenwich Village bogged
down by community opposition and Harvard University where
President Drew Faust suspended an expansion in Boston after
suffering steep investment losses in 2008.

“The fact that he has such a clear vision and such a sharp
focus is critical,” said William Bowen, former president of
Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey. The
Manhattanville campus “couldn’t have happened if he had not
understood the importance of it.”

Yet the focus on growth, including setting up seven
Columbia centers in major cities from Beijing to Istanbul, has
opened Bollinger to criticism that he is shortchanging
undergraduate studies on the existing campus. While the
university envisions constructing 6.8 million square feet of
space in Harlem over several decades at a cost of more than $6
billion, the occupants will almost entirely be professional
schools -- such as the business school and engineering and
sciences, which will move to the site.

Columbia College

The tension erupted last year at Columbia College, the
original institution founded in 1754, where undergraduates are
still required to complete core classes in literature, art and
other classic studies. As Bollinger sought to restructure the
university’s administration and contain costs, Michele Moody-Adams, the college’s first black dean, resigned in protest,
saying she had lost authority over “crucial policy, fundraising
and budgetary matters”, according to an e-mail she distributed.

With the student population up 24 percent to 28,000 in the
past decade, including almost 5,400 undergraduates, and the
expansion fueling much of the fundraising drive, the university
was accused of neglecting Columbia College and the core
curriculum, which “is arguably the most important contributor
to the prestige of the general Columbia brand,” U.S. Circuit
Judge Jose Cabranes, a trustee, wrote in a column in the student
newspaper on March 6.

Undergraduate Funding

“No one begrudges his vision,” said Paul Anderer, a
professor of Japanese literature at Columbia, referring to
Bollinger. In 2007, Anderer left his post as the university’s
vice provost for international relations. “It’s the time spent
on campus. He’s not out there. He’s not engaged.”

Bollinger, who teaches a class one semester a year on
freedom of the press, has given some authority back to Columbia
College’s dean and committed to starting an endowment to support
the core curriculum. The fundraising would come in addition to
the $5 billion capital campaign started in 2006 that has
exceeded expectations, raising about $1.5 billion to support
faculty and financial aid for students, including a $400 million
pledge in 2007 from John Kluge, the founder of Metromedia Inc.,
and a 1937 graduate of the Columbia College.

“I feel very proud of what’s been accomplished in these 10
years,” Bollinger said in a follow-up interview earlier this
month. “There have been very big things to take on and solve in
order for the institution to thrive and reach its potential.”

Public Jeers

Bollinger has shown a deft touch with New York City and
academic politics. While the Harlem community opposed the
expansion and residents jeered him at a public meeting,
Bollinger enlisted David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor
who has taught at Columbia since 1993, to help lobby for the
plan. He also promised the campus would be integrated into the
community, with no gates and open space for residents, according
to Maxine Griffith, a former New York City Planning Commission
official who Columbia hired in 2005.

“Behind the scenes he kept his cool and was able to
understand what the community was saying,” said Scott Stringer,
the Manhattan borough president, who supported the project.

Vincent Blasi, a Columbia Law School professor who has
known Bollinger for decades, said “his style is to win people’s
respect in a quiet way. He sort of sneaks up on you.”

Sticks to Priorities

What’s unusual about Bollinger “is he can form two or
three top priorities and stick with them” said Nicholas Lemann,
dean of Columbia’s School of Journalism. “The fundraising
campaign, he gets credit for that, particularly Manhattanville
and setting up the global campuses. Those I don’t think would
have happened without him as president.”

When Bollinger was lured from the University of Michigan a
decade ago, he was known as the legal scholar who as president
beat back an attack on affirmative action in admissions, a case
that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court will
hear a new challenge on the subject this year. A finalist in
2001 to lead Harvard -- which instead hired former U.S. Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers -- Bollinger was named less than a
year later as president of Columbia, where he graduated from law
school in 1971.

A broad-shouldered, dedicated distance runner, Bollinger
still leads a 5-kilometer race he organizes for undergraduates
every year. He and his wife, the artist Jean Magnano Bollinger,
live at the President’s House, a stone and brick mansion
renovated at a cost of $23 million and reopened in 2003. The
home, on the Columbia campus, is across the street from
Morningside Park.

Wood-Paneled Library

Sitting in a room near the wood-paneled library on the
first floor and clad in a blue suit with white shirt and dark
tie, the president is soft spoken and polite yet resolute about
reestablishing the stature the university had before student
protests in 1968 led to a steep decline. Bollinger agreed two
years ago to a new contract that extends his term until 2016.

Research universities must grow, they have no other option,
he said. Columbia is physically the smallest of the Ivy League
institutions and trails schools such as Stanford University near
Palo Alto, California, that have been adding about 1 million
square feet a decade.

“We have some major catching up to do,” said Bollinger,
who is also chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York. “For four decades we really were constrained. Those
institutions were not constrained in that way.”

All of the top colleges in the U.S. are trying to add space
for research, from Princeton to Yale University in New Haven,
Connecticut, according to John Nelson, a managing director in
public finance at Moody’s Investors Service in New York. Harvard
said earlier this month it may begin a capital campaign in late
2013, the first since 1999, as it seeks to restart construction
on a $1 billion science center.

Cleaning Newsroom

Born in Santa Rosa, California, in the farmlands north of
San Francisco, Bollinger moved to Baker City, Oregon, in 1957
when his father bought a daily newspaper in the faded, gold-rush
boomtown near the Idaho state line. Ten years later, his family
would return to California while he stayed behind, attending the
University of Oregon.

Bollinger recalls being asked to name his specialty as a
law professor when he first arrived at Michigan in 1973. He says
the only thing he really knew was newspapers because he spent
his formative years developing photos, cleaning the newsroom,
and watching his father agonize over writing editorials, so he
picked freedom of the press and the First Amendment.

Fortuitous Timing

While Columbia considered other sites for expansion,
including an area in midtown Manhattan controlled by Donald
Trump, the new president chose West Harlem. Putting together a
team led by Robert Kasdin, the senior executive vice president
who came with him from Michigan, the team identified a 17-acre
site, advertised its interest in the area and began buying the
properties.

The timing was fortuitous, according to Ester Fuchs, a
professor of international and public affairs at Columbia.
Michael Bloomberg, elected mayor of New York City in 2001, was
starting a program to convert dozens of areas across the five
boroughs that were zoned exclusively for industrial use to
parks, industrial, commercial and residential redevelopment. The
mayor is founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent
Bloomberg LP.

“If you had to pick an area for the university to expand
this was the best possible place,” said Fuchs, who worked as a
special adviser to the mayor from 2001 to 2005. “It didn’t have
many residents and the abandoned industrial space and storage
facilities actually depressed the economic value of the area.”

Harlem Suspicion

Yet when Columbia formally unveiled its plan for
Manhattanville in 2004, Bollinger found himself pitted against
Harlem residents suspicious of the institution. While the 1968
protests were ultimately aimed at the university’s links to the
Pentagon and the Vietnam War, they began when students tried to
stop Columbia from constructing a gym off campus in a park it
shared with the neighborhood. The facility was never completed.

In a video from Aug. 15, 2007, Bollinger is shown standing
silently -- microphone in hand, waiting to speak. A crowd at a
public hearing boos and jeers him, holding signs saying “West
Harlem is not for sale,” and ‘Stop eminent domain abuse.’ He is
met with screams of “liar” as he starts to make his case,
telling residents that the “goal is really to do something that
has not been done before.”

Kravis Donation

“They don’t like to use the word Harlem because it is
essentially an Ivy League, elite institution that is encroaching
on a black, working-class neighborhood,” Tom DeMott, a retired
postal worker who lives near the construction site and helped
organize Coalition to Preserve Community, said in a telephone
interview. “They should all find a way to integrate into these
communities instead of taking them over.”

While the local community board ultimately voted against
the plan, the City Council approved the project in December
2007. Columbia pledged $150 million for local development as
well as a share for residents of the 6,000 jobs the construction
will create. New York courts said in 2010 that the state could
use eminent domain to take some of the remaining parcels of land
from owners who refused to sell.

Columbia last year began clearing the site that stretches
from just below 129th Street to 133rd Street. A 2006 donation
valued at more than $200 million from Dawn M. Greene and the
Jerome L. Greene Foundation funded construction of the science
center, and the business school has raised $100 million in a
gift from Henry Kravis, the founder of private-equity pioneer
KKR & Co. Kravis received an MBA degree from Columbia in 1969.

Engineering School

While Cornell University in December won a bid to build a
New York City-sponsored applied-sciences campus, Bollinger has
said Columbia will proceed with a competing proposal to
construct an engineering school in Manhattanville.

Kasdin declined to say how much the university has spent
buying the land.

“In 50 years we would no longer be in the top tier if we
did not have this expansion,” said Eric Kandel, the 82-year-old
Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist who will help lead the
Mind Brain Behavior Institute to be housed at the science
center.

Columbia’s endowment, which is overseen by a new management
group Bollinger installed after he arrived, has helped the
university stay on track, lifting the fund 19.4 percent last
year to $7.8 billion. Columbia’s returns have been beating both
Harvard and Yale, which have the world’s largest private
university endowments of $31.7 billion and $19.4 billion,
respectively.

Endowment Strategy

While Harvard, Yale and other wealthy universities were
forced to borrow money and sell investments to fund operations
amid the credit crisis, Columbia remained relatively unscathed
because it had begun shifting into easy-to-sell assets, which
has also boosted its performance as markets recovered, Kasdin
said.

New York City’s revival has also helped the university,
making it more attractive to students and faculty, according to
Nicholas Dirks, vice president for arts and sciences.
Applications for undergraduate admissions topped 31,000 this
year after reaching a record 34,587 last year, second only to
Harvard in the Ivy League. Columbia accepted just 7.4 percent of
students who applied this year.

Columbia has also doubled its federal research funding to
$883 million since 2002, according to annual reports.

“He’s taken it off the shelf of mediocrity,” Bill
Campbell, the Intuit Inc. chairman who is head of Columbia’s
board of trustees, said about the university’s rise in stature
under Bollinger. “When you start to look at the ratings of our
schools, the consistency of everything we’re doing right now,
it’s all because he’s pushing.”